September 2, 1995

China continued today to obstruct a meeting of nearly 20,000 women here, leading a senior Western official to warn that its actions as host to the Fourth World Conference on Women threatened to overshadow the event itself. "It is just out of control and we have protested very strongly," said the official, a delegate to the conference. "The United Nations has got to move on this," he said, adding that the world body has a responsibility as guarantor of the conference.

On the day capital punishment returned to New York, corrections officials yesterday released regulations governing every aspect of a condemned prisoner's life and death, from the 10 personal photographs he may keep in his final cell, to the number of clocks (4) that must be synchronized, to the exact 29 words a security supervisor is to say once the inmate is executed. Although Gov. George E. Pataki acknowledged that any execution is likely to be a long way off, the 29 pages of regulations released yesterday marked one of the first concrete steps toward reinstating capital punishment, 32 years after the last execution here. The bureaucratic rules are striking in their detail. They prescribe how many witnesses may view the execution, require examinations of any prosthetic devices before prisoners enter death row and outline what steps officials must take if a stay of execution is issued after the lethal drugs begin to flow.

When Senator Bob Dole returned a $1,000 donation from a gay Republican organization last week, his Presidential campaign staff suggested that voters could judge him by the contributions he keeps. The advisers said that Mr. Dole strongly disagreed with the gay-rights agenda of the group whose money he returned, and that he would never knowingly accept money from an organization whose causes he opposed.

An article on Wednesday about a for-profit company running a public elementary school in Wilkinsburg, Pa., misstated the size of the elementary school building. The school, Turner Elementary, is two stories, not four.

The Personal Health column on Wednesday, about hormone replacement therapy for men, misstated an affiliation of Dr. Peter J. Snyder, who said it was not clear whether a decline in testosterone in men starting at the age of 40 or 50 was a condition requiring treatment. He is with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, not the University of Pittsburgh.